


And She Cut Your Hair

by KLStarre



Category: Not Another D&D Podcast (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everybody Lives, F/F, Moving On, Possibility of a Future, Post-Canon, Recovery, The Crick, mutual understanding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,483
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21868414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KLStarre/pseuds/KLStarre
Summary: “Had it this way for too many lifetimes, you know how it is.” Alanis looks Moonshine in the eye, almost daring her to question it or disagree, and Moonshine is…almost completely sure that Alanis is sober. Not coming down from a high, not just about to light up, but stone cold sober. That’s almost scarier than watching her walk alone into the night.Moonshine and Alanis return to the Crick when everything's over. The past is hard to leave behind.
Relationships: Alanis/Moonshine Cybin (Not Another D&D Podcast)
Comments: 8
Kudos: 56





	And She Cut Your Hair

**Author's Note:**

> I'm Jewish and have been waiting for the perfect fic for a Hallelujah title for years I'm valid. The song for this is The Widow Knows by Wyvern Lingo

The Crick is not quiet at night. Nobody has to rest more than four hours, and those four hours are spread out, no one choosing the same time to trance. There are always neighbors stopping by, exchanging food and stories, staying over, and, these days, helping mourn.

There is an hour or two, though, long after midnight and long before the sun will begin to rise, that the Crick is quiet _er_. People who want to pay visits have already been hospitably welcomed, and people who want to go home have not yet felt the urge to leave. Most stars are blocked by the trees, and so the full moon is the only light, glowing softly through the occasional cloud that drifts across it. It reflects off of one of the many tributaries of the Crick itself, a brook that runs deep into the woods and away from the main settlement. Moonshine has followed Alanis here.

Alanis has been staying in her stump, which has been good, because Bev and Hardwon are planning to come to the Crick but they have their own loose ends to tie up, first. Even the noise of the Crick is too much silence for Moonshine, relative to one big bed. And Alanis needs a home. So, it works out.

It also means that Moonshine had heard Alanis slip out the door in the middle of the night, and because the war is just barely over, Moonshine grabbed Rosaline and snuck behind her. Alanis was distracted; she hadn’t noticed the glint of Rosaline’s sword, or when Moonshine tripped over a root that hadn’t been there the last time she had come this way. Now she stands next to the tributary of the Crick, looking into it. Moonshine can’t see her expression, or its reflection, but Alanis’s body language is tense, and she’s breathing deeply.

As Moonshine watches, Alanis reaches into one of the infinite pockets in her tailcoat and pulls out a knife.

“What are you doing?” Moonshine asks, taking a step forward and out of cover before she can stop herself.

Alanis starts, visibly. But she doesn’t try to hide the knife, and she composes herself quickly. “Hi, Moonshine. Should’ve known you would follow me.”

“Yeah, you should’ve. What’re you doin’?” Moonshine relaxes a bit now that it seems like Alanis maybe isn’t actually in danger. She’s seen her possessed, or a vision of her possessed, or her pretending to be possessed, or whatever, too many times to ever be fully secure. Or, well. To be fully secure _now_. Hopefully, someday, they can all relax.

“I’m cutting my hair,” Alanis says, gesturing towards her head with the knife as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. Moonshine glances at her tightly wound black curls, usually held back by goggles but now totally free, bouncing ever so slightly in the breeze. It’s mesmerizing, a little bit, the way it moves.

“How come?”

“Had it this way for too many lifetimes, you know how it is.” Alanis looks Moonshine in the eye, almost daring her to question it or disagree, and Moonshine is…almost completely sure that Alanis is sober. Not coming down from a high, not just about to light up, but stone cold sober. That’s almost scarier than watching her walk alone into the night.

The thing is, Moonshine does know how it is, even if she’s only lived the one lifetime, and an incomplete one at that. Hair is something Alanis can control, now that the Wish stones are gone, and the world is saved again, and she has no purpose left to serve. Moonshine can’t imagine what it’s like, living lifetime after lifetime playing the world like a game of chess and then suddenly no longer having a roadmap to follow.

“Can I help?” Alanis, most of the time, looks like she’s never needed help in her life. She wears her vest and her tailcoat and her boots, and carries her tools, and always has the right spell on hand. Right now, the only tool she has is the knife, and all Moonshine has is the knowledge that she’s good at helping people.

Alanis doesn’t respond for a while, and Moonshine almost thinks she hasn’t heard her. But then Alanis flips the knife in her hand so that she’s holding the blade and proffers it to Moonshine, hilt first. Moonshine takes a second, giving Alanis time to change her mind, if she wants to. She doesn’t. So, Moonshine steps forward and takes the knife. Their hands touch, just the fingertips, just for a heartbeat, and Alanis feels cold, like the blood’s not moving through her right. Then they separate, and Moonshine is holding the knife by its intricately patterned hilt.

No one’s ever praised Moonshine for her restraint, and her intake of breath when she sees the designs woven into the iron is not quiet. It’s – it looks like Thiala and Alanis and Ulfgar, stylized and twisted together, side by side and back to back somehow at the same time.

When Moonshine looks back at Alanis, she’s smiling a wry, sad little smile. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Moonshine nods. “How long?”

“Since the very first time. Ulfgar made it for me, said I should have a weapon. He never really got it through his head that when you can set twenty people on fire at once, there’s not a lot of use for a knife.”

“You seem to have found use for it.”

“Yeah, well, there’s a use for everything, at the Crick.”

Moonshine can’t argue. She’s never – she’s never even thought about what would happen if she lost Beverly and Hardwon. Even this brief period of distance, when she knows they’re coming home to her, has been near unbearable.

“Are we doing this?” Alanis asks, interrupting, and Moonshine shakes herself out of it. She hasn’t lost her friends, and she’s going to help Alanis, who has.

“Shit, yeah. What d’you want?”

“I was just going to saw it all off. You can be more careful about it, if you want, but I want it gone.”

That, Moonshine can do. She steps behind Alanis and can suddenly see both of their reflections in the brook. The way the light moves and the water ripples makes it look like they, too, are side by side and back to back somehow at the same time. Moonshine doesn’t mention it. It doesn’t seem worth mentioning. Instead, she reaches out with the hand that doesn’t hold the knife and gathers Alanis’s hair behind her head, holding it all together.

She doesn’t know why, but Moonshine expected Alanis to be nervous, maybe. But she’s close enough to feel her pulse, and it’s regular and steady. They’re so close together. Moonshine inhales her as she places the knife, slices it horizontally across, finds herself holding most of Alanis’s hair in one hand. The knife cuts like a well-placed kick to a mushroom, and Alanis just smells like a person, not like weed or baby’s breath or lavender.

“D’you wanna keep the hair?” Moonshine asks, and Alanis laughs. Moonshine has barely ever heard her laugh.

“Nah, I’ve got enough shit from the past. What am I going to do with hair?”

“There’s a use for everything, at the Crick,” Moonshine responds immediately, half joking and half sincere, and Alanis laughs again.

“Then give it to the fucking Crick.”

Moonshine leans forward and tosses the bundle of hair into the brook in front of them. They watch it drift away from them, slowly, in silence. Alanis looks wild in her reflection, tufts sticking out in all directions, and eventually Moonshine stops watching and returns to her work.

Before she can resume, though, a cloud drifts just enough to allow the moon to shine down on them, and there’s a glint on metal from the nape of Alanis’s neck, somewhere that had just been covered. There’s a necklace, there, it looks like, a thin gold chain and an intricate clasp. It looks – familiar.

Had she taken it from Bev, somehow? Had they just not noticed? Or – no, she’d lived six lifetimes, with six amulets. “You’ve still got this, too?” Moonshine asks, trying her best not to sound accusatory. Thiala had forced her people to flee, had destroyed Beverly’s home, had been indirectly responsible for the death of Hardwon’s parents and directly responsible for the death of everyone Balnor had ever known. It’s hard to see someone want to keep an amulet that had once belonged to her and not be immediately distrustful. But, of course, Bev has one, too. So.

“Yeah. It doesn’t work. I’ve been trying to fix it, in between other projects, for ages. Turns out you can’t use magic to imitate a pact with a god, who would’ve thought?”

Now, for the first time, Alanis’s pulse speeds up, barely noticeable. It’s hard for Moonshine to keep her hand from shaking. “Why?” Not why can’t she fix it, not why would she try. Moonshine means why does she still have it, this useless reminder of what she’s lost.

“Because I loved her, and at some point, she loved me, too. And this amulet used to mean everything was going to be okay. Wouldn’t you still keep the tooth necklace if you lost Bev?”

Moonshine’s free hand goes to her own necklace, instinctually, to feel the gift she’d been given. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a point. There is no response to be made, so Moonshine goes back to cutting Alanis’s hair.

There’s a shriek from the direction of her stump, and then an eruption of youngin’ laughter, which eventually dies again. They’re so quiet that the way the breeze brushes against the surface of the water is audible, that Moonshine is able to brush away a skeeter before it even lands on her. Finally, she finishes, and it’s not until she lets the hand holding the knife drop to her side that she realizes that Alanis’s eyes have been closed. Moonshine rests her hand on her shoulder. “I’m done,” she says.

Alanis opens her eyes. She’s a Legendary Hero, she’s the most powerful wizard to ever exist, she’s faced down the worst the world has to offer and come back swinging. But she cries when she sees it, just briefly, just quietly, and Moonshine squeezes her shoulder and says nothing. It’s the end of an era.

“Wanna do me?” Moonshine asks, once Alanis’s breathing is once again regular. Alanis leans back against her like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“It would be an honor.” Moonshine can’t tell if Alanis is joking or not, but she passes her the knife, anyway, and then Rosaline. “With the sword?” Alanis asks, and Moonshine remembers that she’s pure caster, might never have even held one, and remembers the days when the only weapon she used was her quarterstaff.

“Yeah, what the hell.” The war is over. Might as well put the blade to a new use.

Alanis takes the sword and steps behind Moonshine. Moonshine doesn’t comment on how Alanis’s grip on the hilt shakes, just enough to be noticeable to elven eyes. Moonshine’s hair will be easy to cut; it’s in its two braids, down the sides of her head, and she’s always loved it like that, but the future is bright and welcoming and she doesn’t have much left to leave behind but she wants to shed _something_. And her gut is saying to do it and trusting her gut has never led her wrong before. “Just chop ‘em off,” she says, and Alanis does.

One, and then the other, Moonshine’s braids fall to the ground and she kicks them into the Crick with gusto. _Yeah_. Her head feels light, feels good. _Everything_ feels light, feels good, except for a slight itch down her back where some of the cut hair has fallen. Without a second’s thought, she strips out of her overalls and walks forward into the water, submerging herself in the Crick before turning to look at Alanis, only her head protruding above the surface.

The Crick is warm, like always, and the mud of the riverbed against her feet feels like home, feels like days playing Set Shit On Fire And Then Hide, feels like she wants Alanis to be able to feel, after lifetimes of having nothing and no one. “You comin’?” Moonshine asks.

Moonshine’s darkvision only lets her see Alanis in grayscale, so it’s hard to make out her expression. She doesn’t move for a second, and Moonshine is afraid that she’s come on too strong, that she’s been read as flirting when she’s just trying to help – although, with Moonshine, flirting and trying to help often go hand in hand. But then Alanis lays the sword and the knife side by side on the Crick’s bank, and shrugs out of her coat, folding it gently before removing her vest and her shirt and laying them all down together. She bends over to untie her boots, one movement at a time, and Moonshine watches her intently. Despite everything she tries to project, she’s still a high elf, and she moves with a grace that most mortal races can never dream of attaining. The shadows that the moon and stars cast make her look almost alien.

Which, in a way, she is.

Her pants and her amulet stay on as she joins Moonshine in the water. “Thought it would be cold,” Alanis says.

“Everything’s warm, at the Crick,” Moonshine responds. They are face to face and close together. Close enough that Moonshine would swear she can feel the gentle in and out of Alanis’s breath.

“Is it now?” Alanis looks good with short hair. Moonshine feels a little bit of pride, looking at her, but mostly she’s distracted by how _good_ Alanis looks with short hair.

She reaches out a hand, and they go briefly palm to palm, before they somehow end up pressed together. They are both the kind of lonely that no one else can understand, but tonight they are able to hold each other and close their eyes and let the water wash everything away.

∞

They return to land when the almost-quiet hours end and the yells of youngin’s once again fill the air. They clothe themselves in silence and Moonshine watches as Alanis unclasps the amulet and stares at it for a long time, before clutching it to her chest and bending down. She picks up the knife that Ulfgar had given her and replaces it beside Rosaline with the amulet that had once belonged to a Thiala who had never existed. Moonshine reaches to pick up Rosaline and then reconsiders, instead quietly whispering the words to a spell and letting mushrooms grow over the sword and the amulet until they might as well have never existed.

Then, hand in hand, Moonshine and Alanis rejoin the waking world, and leave the past behind.


End file.
